[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
Poverty, higher incarceration/crime rates, lower education levels, more specifically lower quality eduction in the schools in their communities, more crime in their communities, more poverty in their communities.
The answer isn’t to try and fix this by “levelling” the playing field with racist (that is the accurate word) differentiations in admission standards/financial aid. But to try and fix the core problems, IE, more black children grow up in poverty-stricken, crime-infested neighborhoods with bad schools than white children do. Until you fix what happens in the first 18 years of life worrying about the four that come after that is ludicrous. A lot of minorities who make it into college solely because of reduced admission/scholarship standards end up flunking out. This is no surprise. The schools they went to did not prepare them for college, and just because one gets admitted and gets a scholarship one doesn’t get prepared in the 3 months between high school graduation and the first day of college classes.
If we’re going to have differing admission standards/scholarship standards it should be based not on race, but on the statistical data about schooling/income because that is what tends to keep people back. A lot of whites in areas like Appalachia are as disadvantaged as any in that they are poor and poorly educated.
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I certainly think that socio-economic concerns are important. I also think that it is not enough to say that poor Blacks are in the same position as poor Whites and that affluent Blacks are in the same position as affluent Whites so lets differentiate based on socioeconomic status alone. Unless you don’t acknowledge that historical racism accounts for the relatively poor socioeconomic status of the Black community, I think you would have to acknowledge that racial preferences is fair method of reversing some of the effects of that racism. I also think that racism exists today, its not as debilitating in the past but I think it still exists, it exists when investment bankers, and corporate lawyers and executives tell each other jokes when no minorities are around, heck sometimes even when there are minorities present. I know this for a fact, I am Asian and for some reason some people feel comfortable telling black jokes around me as if I won’t immediately suspect that they tell Asian jokes when I am not around.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
The idea behind Affirmative Action however isn’t trying to correct those who are disadvantaged it’s to try and give an advantage to those whose parents were disadvantaged. Which defies logic.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see why this defies logic. If your parents were poor and kept that way by society, would you be in the same position as other children even if noone ever discriminated against you in any way? Of course that is not the case here, the case here would be, if I enslaved your parents ancestors for centuries and then I discriminated against them for another century during which time I kept your parents poor (and often in fear for their lives) and then I didn’t try to keep you poor but I still harbored racist attitudes about you, are you in the same position as any other child?
Part of your premise seems to be that racism doesn’t exist anymore. There are still people living today that used to hang Blacks in the south for trying to vote. We are not that far removed in time from the ugliest forms of racism.
Part of your premise seems to be that there is no real difference between poor Appalachian Whites and poor Blacks.
This defies all reason.
